The first one where the police uploaded videos and wanted viewer information is absolutely egregious and makes me wonder how a court could authorize that.
The next one, which I didn’t fully understand, but appeared to be in response to a swatting incident where the culprit is believed to have watched a specific camera livestream and the police provided a lot of narrowing details (time period, certain other characteristics, etc) appears far more legitimate.
They asked for information about a video watched 30k times. Supposing every person watched that video 10 times AND supposing the target was one of the viewers (it really isn't clear that this is true), that's 2999 people who have had their rights violated to search for one. I believe Blackstone has something to say about this[0]. Literally 30x Blackstone's ratio, who heavily influenced the founding fathers.
I don't think any of this appears legitimate.
Edit: Ops [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
So not sure where you got the impression he's okay with up to 100 people being disturbed so we can catch one bad guy.
But then, he wasn't really talking about that was he? Better the guilty go free than the innocent suffer what? He was, essentially, talking about the principle of innocent until proven guilty; that innocent people shouldn't suffer by being punished for a crime unjustly.
2999 innocent people, in your formulation, though, are not being punished for a crime. They're not even being accused of a crime.
They are, however, being harmed.
It's easier to use historical examples because they're not afflicted with modern politics.
The FBI was known to investigate and harass civil rights leaders during the civil rights movement. Suppose they want to do that today.
Step one, come up with some pretext for why they should get a list of all the people who watched some video. It only has to be strong enough to get the list, not result in a conviction, because the point is only to get the list. Meanwhile the system is designed to punish them for a thin pretext by excluding the evidence when they go to charge someone and their lawyer provides context and an adversarial voice, but since their goal here isn't to gather evidence for a particular investigation, that's no deterrent.
Step two, now that they have the list of people interested in this type of content they can go on a fishing expedition looking for ways to harass them or charge them with unrelated crimes. This harms them, they're innocent people, therefore this should be prevented. Ideally by never recording this type of information to begin with.
There is a reason good librarians are wary about keeping a history of who borrowed a particular book.
I agree it would be bad if they were making the request in furtherance of a conspiracy to do either of those things.
But the police asking Google for a list of people who viewed a video, though, is in itself not one of those things. It’s similar them asking a business owner whose business has a camera overlooking a street near a crime scene to hand over surveillance footage (which will include innocent passers by) or a business that sells a product which was known to be used by a criminal to provide a list of purchasers of that product (which will include innocent purchasers).
Many such businesses will voluntarily hand over such information to assist with an enquiry. Some businesses might refuse, or might choose not to have such information.
And this is why judges are involved in the process of issuing warrants and grand juries in the process of issuing subpoenas when the police or a prosecutor want to compel the production of evidence of that sort.
But it just seems inevitable that, at the beginning of an investigation into a crime where the perpetrator is unknown, the first step is to identify possible suspects; by definition not all of the people so identified will end up being investigated. How are the police to do that if they can’t ask anyone for information that might bring innocent people’s names to their attention?
I appreciate it seems idealistic maybe, but it feels to me that we need rules that ensure ‘coming to the attention of the police in the course of an investigation’ is genuinely harmless; not rules that assume it automatically exposes you to harm.
That's the issue, court orders aren't free to make and factors like "it is filming a public street" are taken into account. There isn't anything "public" about "viewing a video stored on a server of a large private website". And there enlies the rub.
Also, the story here isn't just "get me a list of 30k people who watched a video", which may be reasonable:
>The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos.
They want ALL your Google activity for a week, because you watched a video that may or may not have been recommended to you by Google itself. that can include schedules, emails, financial transactions, Maps inquiries, chat records, etc. Depends on how much you use google, but Google can power a lot of aspects of life these days.
Even if you aren't on Google you have your IP revealed for simply viewing a video. That feels like an overreach.
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The second factor is that they barely have a specific suspect. That just think "they saw this video -> they may be money laundering":
> Google to hand over the information as part of an investigation into someone who uses the name "elonmuskwhm" online.
I can't believe that passed a court order. some random handle is selling bitcoin and may have watched this video, so lets get all the data of everyone who watched this tutorial at this time.
>How are the police to do that if they can’t ask anyone for information that might bring innocent people’s names to their attention?
by narrowing it down to more than 30k people. That can be an entire town for some smaller areas
>but it feels to me that we need rules that ensure ‘coming to the attention of the police in the course of an investigation’ is genuinely harmless; not rules that assume it automatically exposes you to harm.
in my mind this is the more idealistic scenario. They've had decades to espouse this sentiment and they aren't even close to doing so.
Also, the issue is that it's not like the government deletes this data after they are done. Quite the contrary. Maybe the US government needs its own GDPR protocol so this won't be pulled up on record down the line.